Why is there chocolate sauce in the Range Rover gearbox? - Edd China's Workshop Diaries 19

hi welcome to the workshop [Music] so [Music] [Applause] right well this is a very big day last time we managed to get john's rotten old range rover to actually start which was quite a moment so the next obvious question is does it actually drive now john's memory of his range rover is rather rose tinted to say the least and apparently it drove into the garden well whether it did or not it's been standing there for a very long time before this very moment so if it does drive i will honour my promise of actually getting out of the workshop giving it a thoroughly good clean before we take it down to the mot to get a thoroughly big spanking no doubt with a massive list of failures and advisories but first things first let's get it out of the workshop that does sound good [Music] now this is a moment that many of you have been longing for it's also a moment that many of you have been very concerned about first of all why hasn't it happened already also there is so much vegetation on this vehicle if i clean it all off then it's no longer going to be carbon neutral there are so many cobwebs on this vehicle that once they're gone there'll be nothing holding the car together in fact there is so much rust that once that's actually fizzing away as we're washing it off the car might actually dissolve completely which might not be a bad thing actually thinking about it also the fact that the doors don't shut also means that the interior is certainly going to get awash but that's no bad thing either there's no getting away from it this is going to happen it's wash day for our range rover and for that i'm going to need some equipment only something a bit more sporty than that that's more like it but this car has got all kinds of things growing in it so it's going to be quite toxic so i need some proper protection right let's do this [Music] now john has said that he's called this car daisy i'd like to give him a counter name perhaps it's silver it's covered in moss at least it was maybe we should call it sterling or perhaps rusty [Music] even more of john's vintage filth with a dirty dirty boy [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] right time to get deep into that grotty undercarriage foreign uh um well that is looking so much better it almost looks respectable one last bit and we're ready for the mot right well now those of you that are keen-eyed will have noticed this is not an mot station and in fact the range rover is still very much stuck in the workshop well it came to the point where she got to drive away popped it into drive and it kind of lurched into gear which is not really a good sign i thought okay i'll leave that i'll keep going see what happens and eventually drive vanished all together now i've had a quick chat with john and it turns out he does have a sort of vague recollection that perhaps the gear box might have had an issue the last time he used it now that was 12 years ago it could be a catastrophic problem or equally it could be the fact that there was a little minor issue and then since then the hygroscopic fluid the transmission fluid that has been absorbing water for all of those years now obviously water has very different properties to the oil that should be in the gearbox which would explain why it wouldn't necessarily work properly so i'm going to try a little trick just in case it gets us to the mot station sooner rather than later i'm going to drop out your while it's still a little bit warm and i'm going to replace it with some brand new oil put in a new filter and just maybe that'll just give us a little bit more miles before we have to actually deal with the gearbox properly but the other issue is once i was going i then had to stop and unfortunately the pedal went pretty much straight to the floor as you'd expect i know the condition that breaks is pretty poor but i wasn't expecting to see any leaks just yet now obviously i've just topped up that fluid there and you can see that the rear of the reservoir is actually still full of fluid it's only the front that's now quite depleted and obviously only just filled that up so the issue must be that we have a leak now i noticed there was a little bit of a sort of trail left by the car on the driver's side so it looks like it's going to be the front driver's side wheel that's going to need attention so i'll drop the fluid first from the gearbox and then i'll start looking at the brakes and hopefully we will get to the mot station today maybe [Music] all right so back under the car there is our engine there is the bell housing of our automatic transmission and there is the oil pan or the sump and of course you've got your drain pump down there but obviously to get to this to actually take this off so i can get to the filter which is actually inside the gearbox i'm going to need to remove this cross member thankfully it's bolted in but of course those bolts have been there rusting for many many years and once it's removed i suspect the chassis is going to kind of slightly move making it harder to get back in but the first thing i need to do is just start draining the old oil out because of course that can take a bit of time just to finish dripping while i'm undoing everything else okay so now with any luck first of all this will actually undo and then hopefully the fluid will mostly go in the container oh dear look at the state of that well that isn't ideal now this should be a nice bright pink color the fact that it's kind of this milky brown means that it's not only burnt but also it's full of water and now having spun it up i've now emulsified the whole thing so this is definitely the right thing to do to drop this out i might leave that draining for a while wow i cannot believe the state of that transmission fluid anyway thank you very much for watching and thank you for all your comments and questions please do keep them coming i've had a couple of comments about a slight squiffiness of the subtitles in some languages and obviously mrs c slaves away tapping away trying to convert my gobbledygook into actual english for those subtitles and although she speaks a number of languages she obviously doesn't speak 48 and so we get google translate to do much of the legwork for that but of course google translate is actually quite good at translating individual words but not so much the nuance of a whole sentence so apologies for that i'm sure over time it will get a bit better now to actually see your subtitles in the first place just click on the cc icon and then if you want to change the language that you see the subtitles in then you can click on the settings which is next to that i've got a question here from frankie pitt be glad when that mini is done and out of the way well you know what no more than myself lily this was supposed to be just a nice quick simple two-day job just to quickly throw the suspension onto neil's mini and it's just expanded and expands and expanded that's obviously what happens in a workshop so it's just one of the things so obviously i'll try and keep mini chat down to bare minimum i do have one more question here from graeme lake i've always wondered when watching you do geometry setups if you should in fact drive the car to settle it before measuring it was a very good question you absolutely should because you need to make sure that the suspension is kind of relaxed position before you start doing any of those measurements but that's exactly why we have these special plates that go underneath the tires so obviously when the car drops down you can see the wheels move as the suspension kind of just finds its nice sort of base position and then actually that's why they're there so you don't have to drive it around before lifting it back onto the ramp to do all those adjustments but that is what those plates are for now i've got just one more question about the mini but i will keep this mini stuff down to an absolute minimum obviously but i can answer this one around the back of the car so this question is from clive williams so does the spherical bearing have a grease point obviously he's worried about the fact that because it lives inside the wheel arch pretty much where all that road spray the mud the grit dog eggs road apples all that kind of stuff is just going to be all over this it might actually contaminate and sort of damage the bearings but also he said as a sort of adds at the end it might at least ought to have some kind of rubber dust cover on each side well interestingly first of all obviously our spherical bearing here actually lives kind of almost actually just past the inner wing lining there so it's actually quite well protected from all that stuff being flung off the wheels but also just the very design of a spherical bearing keeps it nice and clean so imagine you've got your steel ball first of all then you've got the kind of the socket in there and in between those two bits of metal is a liner normally it's kind of teflon nylon ptfe some kind of friction-reducing material but the tolerances are so good that actually it kind of keeps any dirt and grit out of that bearing surface and obviously over time especially with your rally in the car you're going to sort of knock it and bump it and perhaps eventually get these small sort of flats forming on those surfaces and that's when the grit could get in and that's when eventually that bearing will degrade but it should give you some many many many years of good service if you kind of look after them now when it comes to the question of whether this should have a grease point or grease nipple well actually you could argue that adding grease could be detrimental because of course then dirt and grit would be attracted to that grease just making it even more likely to get inside that spherical bearing so they're normally left dry and that way they're going to stay cleaner for longer interestingly when it came to the control arms neil did actually go for the rubber boot protective option when it came to those spherical rod ends and so this way it just prolongs the life of those parts because of course they're going to be more protected from the elements right we've got just one more mini question actually it's more of a comment really from keith walker and getting a bit fed up with this mini back to the range over please fair enough i should get back to the ranger before i go do remember to click subscribe if you haven't already but also remember to ring that bell okay all right well it's been a while and now it's pretty much empty i'm going to pop the sump plug back in but not before you can tell actually a little bit of metal on there as well the magnet on the top is doing its job and dragging any swarf away so clearly at some point we are going to have a look at the gearbox in a serious manner but at least for now i'm not going to get dripped on we've got rid of the nasty stuff so now i'm just going to quickly drop out this cross member and then i can start undoing the sump itself right there are four bolts holding this cross member in position on both sides actually they are coming apart slightly more easily than i was imagining so that's good this one's a bit more tricky to get to so just pop that on there there's been a little bit of strengthening has been put in just here and that's just getting in the way of the ratchet but we've got some traction it's coming apart right so now it is time to gently coax this member away from the chassis now it's obviously everything's undone and it's still kind of levitating so we'll give it a bit of a tap i'm hoping possibly in vain but it'll just pop out [Music] so as i suspected at the moment the chassis is just kind of pinching it into position so i'm just going to keep coaxing it i'm going to try and pull down what i might even do is get a ratchet strap stand on that to sort of keep applying sort of a force down while tapping it so just see how far i get nope okay all right so i'm just gonna pop this down here like so connect it like that and make sure i've got a loop that just gives me just enough room put my foot in there pop it on there like so and then okay so let's give this a go so that's much better see edging down oh it is out so now i get to the sump right so the crossmember out of the way i can now start to remove things to get our sump out of the way to get to the filter which i want to change now the first thing is this big nut here and that's obviously for the filler pipe and where oh the little dipstick goes okay there we go a little bit of fluid may come out of here so i've got my little bowl there actually we're good which is actually just popped up there on the floor so now the next thing is i can start going around all the bolts actually hold the pan to the bottom of the gearbox now there are only six bolts holding this oil pan in place and i'm hoping once they're undone i'll better sort of wiggle it past the exhaust i don't have to keep taking things off this car just to get it to the mot station it's nuts okay this is the last one so where's the last little bit okay so that is the last one let's see if i can wiggle this out oh it's going to be tight you know it's going to be tight now the exhaust is already quite well damaged so i might just try and prise it down just a little bit to release there's something but i think i don't know maybe oh there we go oh that really is the worst condition transmission fluid i think i've ever seen well worth changing right now so we've got to our transmission oil filter which is this square thing just here it's only held on with three little screws but unfortunately somebody's been here before and they've absolutely mashed them so they are a torx sort of socket at least they used to be so the problem we have here is our sort of methods or opportunity to get these off are going to be quite limited so first of all just try with the right torques bit and i'm going to give it a bit of a tap just try and get it in past any mangled material oh no see that's just not even let me try another one so the issue we have is if we try and cut these or grind them or whatever then of course we can end up with really unpleasant swarf flying around the gearbox potentially that'd be very bad oh so done one that is good of course it was the easiest one to get to as well so that's going to be interesting so there we go there's that now let's try the middle one you can see this one sort of holds where the pickup pipe is oh no that's definitely spinning already so i think the next thing to try and do i just use some mole grips perhaps it's a little bit you know a little bit cowboy but i'll give it a go so we'll grab hold of that and try and twist it at the same time maybe it'll come loose now first thing just popping the torx bit into position then get the old moles on there it's not ideal but needs must and go down as tight as i can right so now a little magic bit of impact driving at the same time on its lowest setting oh let's see what happens no no and nope i'll just try one more with this disc no it's not like in it at all so the thing is after this we're either going to have to try a bit of heat or even something more drastic than that no it doesn't look like this is going to come now the problem i have is if we were to grind a slot in the remaining two screw heads then that would at least kind of give me some purchase perhaps for a bigger screwdriver bit or even an impact driver but the problem is then all that grit could very easily fly around and get started to give us so i could obviously maybe use a bit of cardboard perhaps to kind of cover the area just to try and make that bit easier and if i'm doing that i could equally maybe get the old mig welder out and actually weld another bolt onto the end of these nuts and hopefully that heat will penetrate through into the gearbox freeing everything off oh this really is so frustrating but i reckon if we could just get the second screw out then we might have a chance of using the whole of the filter to kind of rotate things around and dave our cameraman has come up with a brilliant idea just to actually put a bit more pressure a bit more sort of load onto the torx bit as it's pushing into the screw to give it a bit more purchase so the idea would be just to get a bit of metal got a trolley jack down here and then also let's put in our socket like so and then i'm just gonna jack that up and effectively push it so i'm starting to lift the whole car here but right so now oh my word look at that he's only gone and done it a round of applause for dave that is fantastic now the great news about this is now i've got a second bolt out we might be able to do is actually kind of peel down the filter because i've got the new filter here and you can just see there's like a little lip on this edge everything else is pretty much flat so if i just pull this down i'm kind of hoping oh there we go oh so now i can actually rotate the whole of the filter around that sort of central point and that's going to mean that that head is going to be moved within the thread and of course that's also going to hopefully relieve things so i might need a bit more pressure again right so just going to pop in our torques but again bring in the pole add the pressure so okay now i've got a lot of movement here it's just got to be enough i've got to try and pull that round at the same time as pulling the socket i think oh yes look at that absolutely amazing and that is really such a relief because this hadn't worked i was then thinking about whether filing some flats on the side maybe grinding a slot in each of the heads and of course all that means there's lots of grit right flying around thankfully we have had to manage to do this without compromising the gearbox in any way which is quite wonderful it's still really sticky though and we're going to need some new bolts oh that is fantastic so our filter is now finally free so now without the way the last thing we have to do before i stop everything back together again is to drain the fluid from the torque converter now inside the bowel housing is our torque converter it's basically a big metal donor and inside it has sort of two half cups full of little fins and what connects them is a load of liquid this transmission fluid and the idea is that the engine is spinning spins one of these discs if you like with all these vanes and those veins then slosh the fluid around and that then drags the other impeller around and that's what's actually powering the gearbox and eventually giving you drive and that's what allows you in fact in an automatic transmission car to sit at the traffic lights with your foot on the brake but still be in drive and as soon as you then take your foot off the brake you can feel that drag starting to pull the car along and as you accelerate obviously this disc is actually sort of spinning faster and faster the fluid sloshing around faster and faster and dragging the other impeller around now the thing is it's full of this liquid and of course we know the liquid is bad so i need to drain it out they very handily give me a little tiny observation hole if you like i can undo those three bolts hopefully that plate will come out and then in somewhere in there i'm gonna have to spin the torque converter around there should be another drain plug but inside on this spinning thing and if i can get to that under it and drain it all out then at least then we know that most of this horrible liquid is gone and we put in the new stuff it's going to get pretty much everywhere it'd probably be worth flushing out a later date but just for now just to get as much of the bad stuff out as possible would be no bad thing that's not what i was expecting oh there we go wow so i've got like a biscuit of unpleasantness so that plug of dirt shows just how long ago this car was last looked at let's see what's inside right so i've now put this big socket on the crank and i've got my torch i can actually see the torque converter inside so if i just kind of crank over the engine very slowly i can see the torque converter spinning around inside and i'm looking for a drain plug now it's possible this is early enough that it doesn't even have a drone plug but if it does i'd love to get that nasty fluid out right there are three lobes on the torque converter and that's how it's attached to the flex plate which is what an automatic car has instead of a flywheel so it's literally a plate to the flexes with a ring gear on the outside so you can actually start the vehicle so it's kind of easy to know i think that's number two looks like maybe number three so there isn't it seems a drain plug on here which is kind of good and bad news basically really lovely to get all that horrible old fluid out of here but clearly that's not going to happen and i guess it just means that when we put all the new fluid back in it's just going to have to mix up and as long as we're 90 there at least we'll be 90 better than we were before we started this process and i guess it means a bit later down the line we'll come and flush it all again or perhaps if i already needed to we can actually take the engine off then get to the top converter then drain it out and start again but i suspect we're going to do some more work on the gearbox further down the line so it's no bad thing so there we are i've sort of saved myself a job in a weird way just because we don't have the drain plug so i'll put everything back together again and now we can start putting the new filter back in place and then start putting everything back in and then get some fluid in right so this is our new oil filter it's quite a simple affair really now the first thing i need to do is just take off that pickup pipe from the old one pop it over to the new one it's very simple again it just twists off it says there we go and it's all fine and then as you can see there's a little o-ring just inside there so you've got any one of those there and i've got a little bit of oil just just to wet that nicely and then make sure that it's going to seal okay because after all you know you need the fluid whizzing around the gearbox without any issues so you want a nice seal on all the bits they're going to be sucking and blowing it about that gearbox all right so that's in position now a tiny bit more transmission fluid just to be absolutely sure and i can pop that into place and then i've got a little spacer i must forget pop that over there like so now the only other thing i need to do is you notice is on this side and it's all rather manky where that connector goes into the gearbox itself into the valve body there's another o-ring right there so again i'm just going to give that a little bit of fluid all the way around just gives it a better chance of sealing i'll just pop that on there like so so now that should seal nicely when it goes back into the gearbox also got some new bolts so ready to go okay so that is now the oil filter in place and now i need the sump and we're on the way we're making some progress at last now i just need to do a little bit of cleaning on this sump i thought i'd just drain out the last of the oil and see what's underneath and it's not looking good it looks a little bit like chocolate sauce which i don't think is supposed to be used in automatic transmission now i fear that's the remains of all the paper clutches that will be inside there so they've probably been dissolved by the water and the contamination so this fix might not work but it's always worth a try right so i've just given our little sump bit of a clean now it needs a brand new gasket so i'm just going to pop this in place almost certainly going to happen is it's going to be knocked off again as i try and fettle it into position but also starts with me to go on so now it's going to pop up here it was a bit of a battle to get off but we'll see let's just try and get this into position in a cunning way so oh look at that really nearly and there we are now they're actually quite clever little clamps you can see a sort of unequal length on either side of the screw the short side goes actually onto the pan the long side goes onto the gearbox itself and that way it stops the seal getting too crushed which is still going to talk it up correctly but still it's quite a smart idea right at least now all the threads have just been a little bit started so i can now just go around very slowly doing up the ratchet but i'll just do a few turns just to get them into the right position and just be mindful all the time that the seal is going to end up in the right position actually the clean metal on the gearbox is helping me with that so last thing to go back on here is the dipstick tube this nice big nut here and then once this is done up we can go onto the top side and fill up the gearbox with some new transmission fluid and then i guess the question will be has this actually worked was all this effort worthwhile wonderful now before i put the crossmember back in i thought i'd just give the chassis rails on either side a bit of a clean just to get rid of the worst of that mud because i think it's going to be a bit of a struggle right now clean enough not quite concourse but it'll do so right now i'm just going to pop a little bit of grease just over this just to help this membrane and say what i'm worried about is that either side of the chassis are going to be coming inward slightly and that's going to sort of pinch the cross member and stop it from going in and i have another trick up my sleeve just in case still a bit of a struggle here it goes i found another secret stash of john's vintage filth you know i mean i hope we could go on for a long time with that all right so it's now time for our cross member to go back in obviously it is very gnarly to do with a lot of work but i just want to get this in so we can get the car started again drive it to the mt and find out what else is going to fail on get a bolt anywhere near in it's not far off there we go one in there we go so we've now got two bolts in position so at least i can now start tightening these up i'm just using a screwdriver to make sure i can get my bolt through my hole i think you can see this has had a bit of manipulation over the years as john's stoved it into rocks presumably and i guess ultimately it holds the chassis together a bit and protects the transmission now i'm pretty sure this isn't going to be the last time that i remove and put back this cross member but i'll sort them up nice and tight now with the cross member securely back in position the last thing we have to do if i can lower the car and put in the transmission fluid is pop in a brand new washer for the drain plug to make sure it doesn't leak lovely [Music] right so we are getting quite close now so time for some fluid 8.52 liters capacity but bear in mind there is some still in the torque converter and also i need to be checking the levels once the engine is running and i've sloshed it through all the gears a few times as well so i'm going to put about seven liters or so in first of all then i'll start her up then we'll start the rest of that process but we'll then be able to find out whether this quick fix which is taking forever is actually worked right well that's really exciting the wheels are turning in all of the gears and it's a much smoother transition so it could be that this quick fix is actually going to be good enough to get us to the mot station just going to check the fluid right okay it's just a little bit over maximum but that's okay because actually it's running a bit hotter than you normally test the fluid at so that's okay so it's going to get us to the mot station the next thing we need to worry about is actually stopping rather than hitting the mot station and for that i'm going to fix those leaky brakes and that is a job for another day

Channel: Edd China

Views: 2,773,347

Keywords: Range Rover, 1986 Range Rover, Rust Treatment, Rust Converter, Rust Remover, Ansell Gloves, Milwaukee Tools, discovery, ed china, edd china, edd china wheeler dealers, edd china’s garage revival, edd china’s workshop diaries, garage revival, outspan orange, practical classics, velocity, wheeler dealers, wheeler dealers edd china, wheeler dealers s13, workshop, workshop diaries, fuel tank, rust, ed china workshop diaries, will it start, top tips, Range Rover Gearbox, Clean

Id: _ciuXFOKqMc

Length: 40min 23sec (2423 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 06 2021